Monday, September 23, 2013

[GUEST REVIEW BY MADELINE BOCARO] (Chimera) Take Me To the Land of Hell is
a pure Yoko fest – including screamers, dreamers and free form rock/jazz/funk
excursions to places we’ve never been before. It’s not all peace and love. The
dichotomy of life is passionately illustrated with hellish imagery and delicate
moments of hope and love. Yoko was spun out of a cyclone that was the first
half of her life. After all the turmoil and ugliness, she can still see the
world as Oz with all its beauty. She keeps on telling us that if we just
believe, all good things will come. Then…there is the dark side. During the
recording sessions, Sean proudly proclaimed, “It sounds like the end of the
world!” I couldn’t wait to hear it!

Sean re-formed the interchangeable Plastic Ono
Band in 2009. POB was first revived for Between My Head and the Sky,
reinstating the essence of Yoko’s instinctive primal rock sound. Other
collaborators this time include Lenny Kravitz, a couple of Beastie Boys, Cibo
Matto, Cornelius and many others. Yoko recently told The Independent,
"People tell me this kind of music is young people's music, and I tell
them, 'I was doing this kind of music before you were born.’"

The album’s opener ‘Moonbeams’ starts with a
birdcall. Not the pleasant chirping of a sparrow, but a warning to us all. Our
duality of good and evil is examined in this wild dance in a ‘cosmic club’.
‘Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…!!!’ ‘Cheshire Cat Cry’ is a warning
disguised as a heavy rock jam. Yoko has always had a Cheshire Cat smile, and like
the enigmatic creature, she is trying to tell us something. The mythical
storybook cat is known to be philosophical, baffling, amusing and mysterious –
just like Yoko, but her message is blatant. ‘Stop the violence, stop all wars’.
The Declaration of Independence is reinterpreted to reflect our
self-destructive urges. The Cheshire Cat is crying instead of smiling.
Featuring Lenny Kravitz on drums and clavinet. ‘Tabetai’ is a reworking of song that Yoko performed live in
1974 on her tour of Japan. Meaning ‘I want to eat’, juicy steak, sweet pancakes
and fried chicken are all on the menu. It is a playful commentary on
famine/gluttony, in an upbeat/offbeat song. When there is no food left (as in
her childhood in war-torn Japan) ‘let’s go to another country.’ Accented by
strange and beautiful beats, and a bottle played like a Japanese flute. A
collaboration with tUnE-yArDs. Who’s
bad? She’s bad! Bad means good, get it? ‘Bad Dancer’ will most likely be Yoko’s
eleventh No.1 dance hit on Billboard’s Dance/Club Play Chart. You will think of
the B-52’s ‘Rock Lobster’, with its psychobilly surf-punk 4-note guitar riff…
but wait, THEY were influenced by YOKO! ‘When your mind is dancing, your heart
is bouncing!’ Members of the Beastie Boys collaborated on this one, and it was
produced by Yuka Honda. Opening
with the tinkering sound of a music box, ‘Little Boy Blue’ is a haunting
lullaby, not far from Yoko and Sean’s own truth. ‘Mommy’s weeping, daddy's
gone…’ Yoko’s delicate singing morphs into haunting screams. Also with
tUnE-yArDs. ‘There's No Goodbye Between Us’ could be a beautiful love song
about anybody, but obviously, John has never left Yoko. Mellophones and
backward piano loops bring a wonderful other-worldliness to the song. The funky ‘7th Floor’ (with Questlove)
has some crazy beats. Lyrically, it’s an amalgam of all the nightmares that
Yoko must have had on the 7th Floor of the Dakota after John’s death. She sees
a dead body on the sidewalk, imagining that it is her own, then realizes that
it’s just a shadow. Angrily, she threatens a phantom killer. Yoko told The Arts
Desk, “’7th Floor’ is the conceptual jump in a way. I just wanted to do
something that furthered the form of my lyrics and music. The song is about a
kind of reality that hasn’t been expressed or pursued yet. We are living in a
three or four-dimensional world, and this is more like a fifth or sixth
dimension. The stunning ‘N.Y.
Noodle Town’ is Yoko’s anthem to her hometown, New York City, with a
beautifully poignant guitar solo! ‘Take Me To The Land Of Hell’ is surprisingly
a ballad. ‘Moon River’ becomes Blood River, which Yoko asks to take her to
John. She is going through hell and back to reunite with him. ‘Where you and I
meet soul to soul, to never be apart again’. This piano based lament echoes
‘Mrs. Lennon’ and also evokes Nico’s beautifully chilling, ‘You Forget To
Answer’. ‘Watching The Dawn’ reminds us that we are ‘offsprings of lovers &
dreamers, and ‘descendents of thinkers and builders”. Yoko ruminates about our
transformation into evil leaders and victims. She is compelled to tell us that
it is still possible to hold onto our dreams in this frightful world. This is
hard to believe after all of her hardships, but Yoko is still trying, still
hopeful. In the vein of ‘Yes, I’m
Your Angel’ (Double Fantasy), ‘Leaving Tim’ is a playful old-fashioned tune.
It’s great to hear the laughter! ‘Shine,
Shine’ is the ultimate wakeup call. It is driven by an incredible bass line,
similar to the powerful ‘Why’ (from Yoko’s first Plastic Ono Band solo album,
1970), but with positivity, love and light! The song ends in a vortex of sound
that sucks every thought out of your brain except for the one that says, “This
is now my favorite album of all time!” The silent ‘Hawk’s Call’ could possibly be a cover version of
John Cage’s 4’33”, or a reprise of the 'Nutopian International Anthem'.

The very first form of music that existed must
have been just like Yoko’s – millions of years ago - before language, before
instruments...the first prehistoric bird call, the grunt of a cave man, the
first vocal expression of joy or sadness. The music of the future will probably
resemble hers as well (whether it be made by humans or aliens).

I really hope there is an afterlife for one
reason only - so that John Lennon can see all of Yoko's triumphs, and know that
his dream has finally come true. For all we know, he might be behind all of
this.

Monday, September 16, 2013

(Voodoo Rhythm) Stripped down, digital age-averse, animal-esque garage-abilly from South Africa that's as ominous as a South African villain in a Lethal Weapon movie and as dangerous as a starving lion in a neglected South African game park and as awesome as the classic South African garage rock of A-Cads or Johnny Congo (and exactly 1 million times awesomer than Dave Matthews). This sounds like genuine 60s rock...as in the year 60, when people made music by beating rocks.

(brramblers.com) Endearing Cleveland college bar alt rock voodoo that has many seductive charms, the least of which is that's it's hard to describe exactly what they do, as they mess around with jam band, Island sound, bluesy stuff, pop, the mellow, and the rockin'. Burn on!

Friday, September 6, 2013

(Guest Review by Jonathan Poletti) (Eschatone) It takes the world awhile to catch up toRoctoberbut you like to note progress. The Jobriath appreciation way back in issue #25 (summer 1999) set in motion an effort by the ill-fated Rhino Handmade to release the glam un-star's fairly extensive unreleased catalogue, to include "one of the most exciting items ever to emerge on eBay" as David Thompson once wrote: "a reel of unreleased material recorded by Jobriath with producer Eddie Kramer, shortly before he signed to Elektra." Now in 2013 three tracks off the 1971 demo reel are released by the maverick genius Jed Davis of Eschatone Records, who promises more, including hopefully Jobriath's resulting 1972 album. But check out "As the River Flows," his ode to time. It takes a closer listening: what could be a generic "oh whoa ohh oohhh" is in his transcription "oh woe" — a reminder he was a tragedian & his view of life & himself star-crossed. For the studio version he'd draw on his teenage direction of church choirs & haul in a chorus from the casts of HAIR andJesus Christ Superstar.The refrain — "As the river flows / so must you and I" — would not have been as dark to them as I hear it now. "Must" is the key: in a hymn to a universe with no God in it, he's impelled forward to the scene, two years later, of his crucifixion by media & his life's grim end.

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

(GUEST REVIEW by Jake Austen) I had a pretty amazing comedy-themed Memorial Day Weekend. Setting the table
was the closing night of the Black Harvest film festival, featuring a preview
of Whoopi Goldberg’s Kickstarted Moms Mabley documentary, I Got Something to Tell You, which will be on HBO eventually
(hopefully before Black History Month). Goldberg, who once did a Mabley tribute
show, does a wonderful job creating not so much a portrait, but a satisfying
survey/appreciation of one of the greatest stand up comics in American history.
Because the Mabley character was a coy construct and she did not break character
in interviews, there is really not enough available material to present a true
biography of Mabley a/k/a/ Loretta Mary Aiken, who (like Grandpa Jones of Hee Haw fame) was playing an elderly
person from her youth and aged into the image. And because other than a few
race movies, footage of Mabley is mostly from the last few years of her life
when the presumed septuagenarian (her birth date is disputed) found a new
audience on talk and variety shows in the late 60s and early 70s, Goldberg had
to devise clever methods to play material from her excellent 60s LPs (with
animation or animated text on the screen as the records spun), or have comics
who came up in the 60s and 70s discuss her impact. Though not a problem
exactly, what this does is skew the focus to her late standup career, when I
personally want to know more about her vaudeville/minstrel circuit/Broadway
career in the twenties and thirties. When Goldberg, as narrator, gives Mabley
props for co-writing a show with Zora Neale Hurston and then doesn’t follow it
up (I know she and Hurston played cheerleaders in a skit where Tim “Kingfish”
Moore was a footballer, but not much more than that), it a bit of a tease. This
is made more frustrating by the few interviews with survivors of that era
revealing genuinely fascinating snippets of info about Mabley’s personal life
(her offstage life as “Mr. Moms,” for example).

Goldberg,
however, doesn’t let the gaps in Mabley’s history serve as pit traps, instead
focusing on her material, particularly the bold political content of her
humorous, scathing, critiques on American racism. Though she dressed in a house
coat and funny hat, took out her dentures, and spoke in a relaxed, stammering
drawl (perfect for lengthy raconteuring, though not always the best for sound bites,
as this film demonstrates), she seemed safe and harmless, but her jokes about
the absurdity of segregation, lynching, and racial epithets are all the more
powerful because this sharp commentary is coming from an unexpected spokesperson. The comics and scholars interviewed who
provide context and commentary include Cosby, Arsenio, Kathy Griffin, Bambi
Haggins, Robert Klein (interviewed on the Apollo stage [?]), and a rare Eddie
Murphy talking head (though his explanation of his elderly female Klump character
being a Mabley impersonation demonstrates a coarse misunderstanding of Mabley’s
bold take on female sexuality). But most impressive is the way deft editing of
the sparse Mabley film footage advocates for her genius. Her earnest singing tribute
to her slain friends MLK and Jack and Bobby Kennedy has been presented as a
novelty record over the years, and seeing her perform it on Hugh Hefner’s TV
show with Barbi Benton, Sammy Davis Jr, Paul Mooney, and various Playmates
paying rapt attention could also be presented as silly or absurd. But here we
see it as the artistic, soulful triumph it really was. And her terrible movie Amazing Grace is reduced to one scene of
pleading oration that is presented as improvised, honest, and vital. In our
house Mabley’s records get a lot of spins, so I hesitate to call her a
forgotten figure, but for the countless folks who don’t know how awesome Moms
was, this is a vital work.

I thought
about Mabley’s coy stage character a couple of days later when Dave Chappelle
took the stage headlining the Oddball Comedy Festival in Suburban Chicago. Even
before walking off his TV show (close to a decade ago!) Chappelle had starred
in a stoner comedy and certainly appeared half-baked during the introductions
to his skits on his iconic program which tackled taboos and stereotypes with
bold, unnerving recklessness. So combine an image of a guy who’s high and doing
dangerous comedy with his mysterious exodus from the show, abandoning a huge
contract to disappear overseas, and people started calling Dave Chappelle
crazy. That his rare stage appearances over the last 8 years have been odd at
times (unannounced appearances at the Laugh Factory where he spent hours
talking intimately with the audience; theater shows where he seemed ill prepared)
further fueled that reputation. And when he reacted to a disrespectful crowd in
Hartford, CT two days prior to the Chicago show by basically walking off in
disgust the legend of volatile, anything-can-happen Dave was further cemented. But
watching Chappelle on stage, chain-smoking, mumbling profanities, raging
against the Hartford crowd (he considered doing a “reverse Kramer,” and just
yelling “Crackers!”) it certainly felt possible that the “Crazy Dave” persona
was a smokescreen; like Mabley he was presenting himself in such a way that it
made it so much more impactful when he made brilliant, deep-cutting commentary
on profoundly disturbing, important subjects (such as referencing two ancestors
both born of interracial couplings, “one from love, one from rape…but alls well
that ends well!”). And while I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the Hartford
incident was a calculated stunt, I will say that if it was, it was incredibly successful! To start off a
tour with the equivalent of punching out the biggest guy on your first day in
prison could not have been more effective. Not only was the audience nervous
and vulnerable in ways that left us primed us for laughter, but we were on some
otherworldly good behavior. Signs were posted everywhere about not heckling,
texting, or taking pictures or video during the show, and during Chappelle’s
set I did not see a single phone out! Whenwas the last time you were out a show
where no one took a picture or video? And this is 17,000 people!

I had
gone in with low expectations. A massive, outdoor comedy festival sounds like a
nightmare to me. Comedy outside in a giant venue with the scale not allowing
the performer to vibe with the audience seemed like a terrible formula, and the
eclectic lineup seemed theoretically appealing, but inevitably disastrous, as
so many of the drunk, mob-mentality masses would be disinterested in too many
of the acts. But I was wrong. Though I missed the warm-up second stage with
lower profile comics (overseen by Brody Stevens, perhaps the best crowd work
comic I’ve ever seen), the main show, a well-paced four-hour extravaganza, was
a rousing success. Emcee Jeff Ross had some decent jokes (I thought he had
cornrows to address the black concertgoers coming to see Chappelle, but it was
revealed on Memorial Day that it was to mimic James Franco’s Spring Breakers character for Franco’s
TV roast). Opener Kristin Schaal came out in male drag as an offensive Gen-Y
Diceman-type sexist comic, and was hilarious. Al Madrigal’s disaffected
domestic comedy was sharp (you’re not going to get better piñata jokes).
Westside comic Hannibal Burress destroyed the crowd with a killer, dynamic set,
ending with a huge semi-coherent rap parody with lights, smoke, and ballet
dancers. The only misstep of the night was making Dmitri Martin follow local
hero Burress, but his low-key set was funny and warmly received. And
co-headliners Flight of the Conchords certainly drew had a lot of fans of their
acoustic folk-rap musical shenanigans, but a majority of the crowd who came to
see Chappelle had no idea who they were, and despite thick New Zealand accents
and absurdist juxtapositions of R&B tropes with mild tales of complimentary
muffins and weekend parenting, the crowd was with them.

Then it
was Chappelle time. My expectations for his set were also low, for while I
would have loved to have been at an intimate five hour Comedy Store set, with
stage and audience barriers breaking down and vulnerabilities exposed, that
wasn’t going to happen here, and if he was going to come out ill-prepared his
deficiencies would be magnified after 3 hours of exquisitely crafted comedy.
And if such low-expectations were another trap Chappelle set, I fell into it,
because he was amazing. Mixing old
and new material, Chappelle’s 45 minutes were rock solid, his storytelling
enchanting, his comic timing Redd Foxx-like, his fury at Hartford, and
subsequent satisfaction with Chicago, functioning as the most successful “It’s
great to be here tonight in (fill in the
blank)” imaginable. He masterfully wove together stories of family life (a
lecture to his son about it being OK to quit causing community repercussions; a
Chappelle classic about his wife having to explain what “pussy” is to their
young child), he fantasized about hiring Paula Deen as a private chef, and he
playfully messed around with his deejay and a security guard. He addressed all
the themes about Chappelle that fascinate and confuse us, and most importantly,
he demonstrated that he is a masterful stand-up comic, and like Richard Pryor
before him, whatever might be troubling him personally he is able to translate
into electrifying energy on stage.

The
bottom line is, Hartford hecklers aside, people deeply want to love Dave
Chappelle, and when he’s this good he makes it easy for us. Stand up may be the
best outlet for him, but anything’s possible (he seemingly mended bridges with
his sketch writing partner Neal Brennan earlier this year by appearing at
Brennan’s comedy night). In Hartford he had his deejay play Kanye West’s “New
Slaves” as his early exit music, marking his state of mind that evening (he
told us several times it was a miracle he continued the tour). In Chicagoland
he recounted a funny anecdote about putting Kanye on TV for the first time
(shortly after he’d been anointed by Jay-Z on the same stage Chappelle now
stood upon) and when he exited it was to the joyous NWA/Watts 103rd
Street Band “Express Yourself.” I’m anxious to see how Chappelle expresses
himself in the future, and I’m thrilled to verify that he truly deserves to be
considered alongside comedy heroes like Pryor, Foxx, Moms Mabley.

Monday, September 2, 2013

(Almost Ready) Two little dips of charming, elegant power pop from the decades-dormant band's recent comeback album, packaged pretty for Record Store Day, and far more valuable than that that 360 gram vinyl quadruple LP reissue of Huey Lewis' "Sports," or whatever else they reissued last RSD.